Description of Bioethics Expertise

RESEARCH INTEREST:
Transplantation research ethics, genetics, reproductive technologies, health policy, and general bioethics

ABOUT:
Currently, the Emmanuel and Robert Hart Director of the Center for Bioethics and the Sydney D Caplan Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Prior to coming to Penn in 1994, Caplan taught at the University of Minnesota, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University. He was the Associate Director of the Hastings Center from 1984-1987.

Born in Boston, Caplan did his undergraduate work at Brandeis University, and did his graduate work at Columbia University where he received a Ph.D in the history and philosophy of science in 1979.

Caplan is the author or editor of twenty-nine books and over 500 papers in refereed journals. His most recent books are Smart Mice Not So Smart People (Rowman Littlefield, 2006) and the Penn Guide to Bioethics (Springer, 2009).

He has served on a number of national and international committees including as the Chair, National Cancer Institute Biobanking Ethics Working Group; the Chair of the Advisory Committee to the United Nations on Human Cloning; the Chair of the Advisory Committee to the Department of Health and Human Services on Blood Safety and Availability; a member of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Illnesses; the special advisory committee to the International Olympic Committee on genetics and gene therapy; the ethics committee of the American Society of Gene Therapy; chair of the advisory committee on bioethics for GlaxoSmithKline and the special advisory panel to the National Institutes of Mental Health on human experimentation on vulnerable subjects. And most recently was the Co-Director of the Joint Council of Europe/United Nations Study on Trafficking in Organs and Body Parts.

He is a member of the board of directors of The Franklin Institute, The Keystone Center, Tengion, the National Center for Policy Research on Women and Families, Iron Disorders Foundation and the National Hemophilia Foundation’s Ethics Committee. He is on the Board of Visitors of the Columbia University School of Nursing.

Caplan writes a regular column on bioethics for MSNBC.com. He is a frequent guest and commentator on various media outlets.

Caplan is the recipient of many awards and honors including the McGovern
Medal of the American Medical Writers Association and the Franklin Award from the City of Philadelphia. He was a person of the Year-2001 from USA Today. He was described as one of the ten most influential people in science by Discover magazine in 2008. He has also been honored as one of the fifty most influential people in American health care by Modern Health Care magazine, one of the ten most influential people in America in biotechnology by the National Journal, one of the ten most influential people in the ethics of biotechnology by the editors of Nature Biotechnology.

He holds seven honorary degrees from colleges and medical schools. He is a fellow of the Hastings Center, the NY Academy of Medicine, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the American College of Legal Medicine and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.